They have just about any option they want....at their disposal. Their pick of the litter.

Yet they seem quite content at 10.There is quite a bit of distance between the east five and the west five.....but, doesn't seem to be making any problems.Creighton is quite a distance from the four closest schools....yet, doesn't seem to bother anyone.

Maybe...they are content...and will stay at 10?I'm guessing that tv money might be one of the items that push them to expand. But, I don't know anything about their current contract.

At this point I think the only thing that makes the Big East expand is if Fox gets desperate for more basketball programming to air and gives them a financial incentive to go beyond their current 10. There are certainly schools out there that fit the Big East profile who could boost the overall quality of the league and I think we all know who they are--St Louis, Dayton, Duquesne, VCU/Richmond. Perhaps there is even a what if scenario out there where UConn becomes a football independent and rejoins. By not including any football schools in their league the Big East has insulated itself from any football related realignment shake ups. To summarize, the Big East can expand when ever it wants and take whomever they want.

Part of me thinks the only way they'll expand is if they can negotiate something with Gonzaga. TBE needs content. This year is much better for them than last year, but adding programs that aren't historically strong creates content issues. You already have schools like DePaul and Seton Hall looking bad most seasons. When you add down years for guys like Marquette, Creighton, SJU/Provy...looking to St. Louis isn't a fix. Looking to Richmond won't make it better.

The Big East is going to probably stay private. They don't want the same money to expand, they want more. Truth is, though...their best options to make the conference a better basketball collective don't reside on their side of the map or operate through a church. Or they tick off schools who are already members.

Big East Candidates Ranked1. Connecticut... Big East should keep waiting to see if they pull the plug on football2. Temple... ditto3. Boston College... ditto (and they were the lone Power 5 vote against stipend increases.... hmmmm)4. Wake Forest... ditto5. Any small school located between Creighton and Providence that makes multiple final fours from this season onward (ala Butler and we can count VCU's recent trip as 1 final four).6. Dayton... they sell out their home games and have a better basketball history (arguably present) than half of the schools in the conference.7. VCU... If Fox forced me to, I'd take VCU and Dayton right now.

Wildcards...

Miami-Florida. Yes, them. Rumors of de-emphasizing football are back. They don't want The U: Part 3.Northwestern. Delany made the curious statement, "Unions have no place in the Big Ten". Hmmm there's a chance.Notre Dame. This nearly happened and Fox pushed for it. Would require a wait until the current ACC Grant of Rights expires in 2026. If the SEC raids the ACC hard enough (say FSU and Clemson) there might not be an ACC for Notre Dame's Olympic Sports.Iona/Manhattan/Buffalo ect. See #5. Butler came from the Horizon League. It's not that far-fetched for Iona in the MAAC.Holy Cross and another Catholic school. If only to sell the league to viewers as 11 Catholic Schools and lovable Butler. Basically, a "Catholic Sports for Catholics" thing ala Notre Dame but on a smaller scale and more overtly Catholic.Duke. If I'm including Wake Forest and no more ACC scenarios, this is the logical dream candidate.

I'm confused what this conference really would consider if they balked on UConn, as has been "reported" or speculated. There are some connections between those two sides that concern me if TBE passed. Something about this split never seemed to sit right where it concerned its identity and direction. I remember reading the letter Villanova's AD sent to its students and alumni, and the sense of revisionist history/legacy he seemed to create about the conference and its private school roots (so what about UConn and approaching Rutgers?). People on the VU boards say the guy's a mouthpiece for the Augustinian Order running the joint...so, are those guys, those at that level, the ones calling the shots on this new conference? If so, this won't be about basketball...

Temple might as well be St. Joe's, Villanova will block them both. Boston College always has an invite, it sounds like. VCU, Dayton, Wichita State, George Washington, St. Joe's...these are the ones that make the conference better for basketball. They're the ones who know how to get to a tournament. Other than Dayton, I doubt anyone makes the cut, and even if Dayton could, they'll be announced after someone else.

What the Big East really doesn't want to see happening is its western properties all populating the bottom of the conference. This isn't a good year for DePaul (shocker there), Marquette, and Creighton. Thankfully, Butler's fighting and Xavier's more up than down...but the power is not on that western flank. When you toss in someone like SLU, who isn't all that consistent, either...you could really have yourself some dead weight...and that really doesn't look good because it's the side of the conference you volumized.

Bishin, you are definitely right about the revisionist tendencies among the Catholic 7 when it comes to the history of the Big East. When the Big East was founded it was on the premise of putting the Northeast's best basketball programs under one umbrella regardless of wether the schools were public or private, Catholic or non-sectarian. What divided the conference was the need to accommodate the football programs of the schools who participated ain the sport at the DI-A level and that required expansion. Expansion for the sake of football resulted in a change in conference identity and when it comes to the revisionist narrative propagated by the Catholic 7 there is a strong element of nostalgia for the good old days when basketball took center stage and they seem to forget that Pitt and UConn were public schools and, for decades, loyal Big East members. The Catholic 7 blame the football schools for something that was entirely out of their control. I'm not sure how they could have avoided or prevented the ACC raid of 2004-2005. I feel like the Catholic 7 took out their hostility for the raid on the football schools who stayed rather than directing it against the 3 that left and then handicapped programs like Pitt, Syracuse, Rutgers, West Virginia, and UConn who were trying to hold the two sides together and continue the Big East's proud basketball heritage while guaranteeing a football future for their conference. The Catholic school's reluctance to grant their football-playing conference mates what they needed to hold the league together and their use of the unholy alliance with Notre Dame doomed the league. Those schools caught the in the middle ultimately had no choice but to take the lifelines extended to them when they were offered.

When we jump forward to the present those same prejudices prevent the modern a Big East from making any moves that seem out of the box. UConn continues to bear the blame for a conference split that wasn't their fault. Programs like Boston College are the ones really to blame and UConn is just as much a victim of BC's treachery as the Catholic 7 because they lost their closest rival. Also holding the league back is the rampant protectionism that is throughout the league. The Big East schools don't want to share their markets and allow other schools to ascend to their level even if they have proven their worthiness. No school in Philadelphia will ever get to join the Big East nor will any in NYC or DC. Newcomer Xavier likely harbors a similar attitude towards nearby Dayton. Boston remains a possibility but there currently isn't a private school available that would fit the mold. Adding UMass and/or UConn would embroil the Big a East in football once more and the current membership wants nothing to do with that sport or any university that seeks to play it at the highest level. The Big East of today operates under a similar philosophy as the Ivy League--smallness is synonymous with eliteness and even though there are schools that would make sense in their league and probably add to its overall value they simply aren't interested in enfranchising others into their fraternity.

What divided the conference was the need to accommodate the football programs of the schools who participated ain the sport at the DI-A level and that required expansion.

Muskie -- Is there an article or source that states why the Big East felt the necessity to even host football? I'll take a not-so-blind-shot-in-the-dark and say money.

I know Georgetown and Villanova, and now Butler, play football at the FCS level. The rest used to have football programs with the most recent two being St. John's (2002) and Seton Hall (1981).

A basketball-centered, non-football Big East Conference with Georgetown, Seton Hall, Providence, St. John's, Villanova, Marquette, and DePaul along with Notre Dame, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Syracuse, and Connecticut would've been great for a Northern Midwest and Northeast conference. There could've been another conference with football (Metro Conference?) that had full members in Virginia Tech, Boston College, Temple, Cincinnati, Louisville, Miami FL, Memphis, and Rutgers --- or whoever you would put into it --- that also had the football teams from Pittsburgh, West Virginia, Syracuse, and Connecticut. A 12-team football conference split North/South:

I don't have an article on hand that expressly states why but I think money is definitely the primary suspect. It's far easier to make money on college football when you have a conference affiliation and the ability to collectively bargain for television rights with a bundle of schools. I also think these schools were shaken up when some of the nation's top independents--Penn St, Florida St, and South Carolina all joined leagues. I think BC, Pitt, and Syracuse got scared and felt that they needed to grab up the other independents and house them under one roof if they were going to keep up in the arms race.

Looking back, the Atlantic 10 was in a similar situation--they had 3 schools who played DI-A football: West Virginia, Rutgers, and Temple and had just lost Penn St to the Big Ten. They also had 6 who didn't (the Big East had the same number). You also had the Metro and Great Midwest (who would later merge partially to be able to sponsor football) floating out there with some decent football programs.

At the time the Big East was playing the best basketball out of all of the aforementioned leagues so I guess they were the ones that had the strength to pull the football league together. Conference mates like Georgetown, Villanova, St Johns, and UConn would have been incredibly difficult to part with. Pitt, Syracuse, and BC ultimately went with a strategy where they could have their cake and eat it too be staying in the East's strongest basketball league and have a conference home for football. For the 6 non-DI-A football schools in the league I think they originally envisioned that the arrangement would be a football only relationship (only Miami joined as a full member in 1991) and that the rest would have simply stayed in their own conferences for all other sports and and that there would not be an influx of new members with different goals for the conference.

The northeast was and remains to be just a hot mess where it concerns athletic departments, institutional types, and attitudes. You had some saying the Big East was a failure the moment it started football operations without Penn State, or the Service Academies. I would say the schools they should have never worked with were the ones always itching for the ACC, like Miami and Virginia Tech, but even that overlooks the sentimentality of some of its core, non-fb schools, who saw the conference as a northern basketball equivalent of the ACC, which only spanned from Atlanta to DC, with half the conference located in one state at that time, and content with their footprint.

The Big East was the "northeastern" project that succeeded in becoming a comprehensive conference after all of the other attempts failed. It should have been obvious it was destined to never get things fully right with all of its geographical residents. Just like you can't make the private school who thinks it's an Ivy League institution wanting to be any sort of equal with a state school, with the sort of diversity that exists in the northeast, problems were destined to arise.

Politics remain to be this conference's problem, because there are very worthy programs that will make the conference better in its basketball haul, but they won't touch them. Adding even one or two additional schools without payout dilution...it should be a no-brainer. If there's distrust for UConn because of their football and what might happen down the line if the ACC or Big Ten were to want them, it's hypocritical to hold that against them. From what it sounded like after Pitt and 'Cuse received their invites, Big East schools with and without football programs applied to join the ACC with them.

fighting muskie wrote:

The Big East of today operates under a similar philosophy as the Ivy League--smallness is synonymous with eliteness and even though there are schools that would make sense in their league and probably add to its overall value they simply aren't interested in enfranchising others into their fraternity.

Gospel truth.

And you can see it with this obsession the conference has with Boston College, who it has always tried to reach out to, despite them stabbing the conference in the back, while UConn is kept out. There's more than just athletics going on here.

The Northeastern schools are like one giant, dysfunctional family. BC is somehow a favorite yet prodigal son but UConn can't seem to do anything to make their Catholic siblings happy.

In examining the history of the northeastern conferences I think I've found two pivotal points where a northeastern football league could have been successfully formed but failed.

The first is 1976 when the EBCL, forerunner of the Atlantic Ten, was formed. The founders were Villanova, Pitt, Penn St, Rutgers, West Virginia, Duquesne, George Washington, and UMass. Had Syracuse and Boston College been persuaded to join that would have placed 6 DI-A programs under the same conference umbrella. Presuming that Temple was still extended an invite to the Atlantic Ten in 1982 that would have made 7. To round out a football league they could have invited Virginia Tech, Florida St, and Miami as either full members or associates to reach 10. Including Army and Navy, if interested, would have put them at 12.

A second critical point in the timeline where a conference could have formed was in 1979 when the Big East formed. Rutgers turned down an invite to join the new conference. Had Rutgers said yes in 1979 then in 1982, when the 8-member Big East was voting on expansion members Pitt and Penn St, Rutgers could have cast the critical "yes" vote to bring the Nittany Lions into the Big East. As it were, there were 8 schools voting and only 5 said yes; had Rutgers been sitting at the table their "yes" vote would have given Penn St the necessary 2/3rds majority. Had Penn St, Pitt, and Rutgers all been in the same league as Syracuse and BC that would have made 5 full members with football. West Virginia, Virginia Tech, Temple, Miami, and Florida St could have been included as either affiliates or full members and a solid East Coast block would have been formed.

The Wild Card out there in both of these scenarios is the ACC. Had the Northeastern schools shored up support from Miami and Florida St early enough perhaps the 8 member ACC would not have had the strength to sway the Florida schools and Virginia Tech to leave. Perhaps, had the football schools been able to seize the driver's seat, the basketball schools might have been expelled or otherwise driven off and it would have been the Atlantic 10/Big East who raided the ACC--perhaps in conjunction with a raid by the SEC

To answer the football question, I think the impetus to add football came along with the addition of Miami ("the U").

The BE during the BB hey-day was:5 Catholic BB schools (no football) Providence, St. John, Seton Hall, Georgetown, Villanova4 schools that had football Pitt, Syracuse, BC, and UConn (who was D-IAA, but thinking about up-grading).

the conference eventually expanded to 14....ND (football independent)WVU, Rutgers, VA Tech, and Miami (all had football).

UConn had not upgraded to D-1A football yet, so to get to the minimum requirement in FB, they added Temple as a football affiliate only.

In the early 2000s, when the FB conference lost Miami, Va Tech, BC to the ACC, they were donw to 4 FB teams + Temple.UConn committed to upgrade to D-1A, and they added Cincy, Louisville, USF as full mmebers and kicked Temple out for basically being terrible at that time.

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